H&M Says It’s Making Amends For Its Racist ‘Monkey’ Hoodie. It Hasn’t

The retail company was speaking out months after the public relations nightmare.

Remember the clothing catalog fiasco surrounding H&M’s choice for who to model its “coolest monkey in the jungle” hoodie? While the global retail giant would probably like to forget about it, part of what it hopes will be a healing process has included an international apology tour.

That was true last week when the company discussed its racist blunder during the Anti-Racism Network South Africa conference in Johannesburg, according to IOL, a South African news outlet that covered the event. But for many, the image of a dark-skinned child wearing the garment with wording that evoked racist stereotypes for Black people was inexcusable.

“This was a big mistake and we simply got it wrong,” H&M’s manager for South Africa, Oldouz Mirzaie, told conference attendees in stating the obvious.

To try to rectify the situation, Mirzaie said H&M has been working with “a black-owned creative and advertising agency. We intend on taking the processes that we have implemented in South Africa, and at our head offices in Sweden, globally into the stores that we have in various countries.”

Amazingly, H&M failed to mention the very pink elephant in the room: an obvious lack of diversity in decision-makers at the company who, had they been in place, would have almost absolutely sounded the alert on what was clearly feeding into racist tropes about Black people.

In fact, a closer look at the company’s leadership seemed to reveal that there was not one single Black person in a corporate position. While that was not able to be immediately confirmed as fact, H&M’s website for “organisation and management” showed that neither the company’s top leaders nor its leadership for the H&M brand, in particular, named a single Black person.

That would suggest that perhaps H&M didn’t get the full memo that Black customers resoundingly told them after the racist public relations nightmare in January. This, even as profits plunged as a result. All of which could suggest that while H&M did, in fact, learn a valuable lesson in the unfortunate episode, it wasn’t completely committed to correcting the error of its ways by seeking to fill an obvious company-wide void of diversity to help keep it honest in future ad campaigns that include anyone but its lily-white clientele.

4. A lesson

Stuff like “Racially charged,” “Racially tinged,” and “Racial stumbles” is bad not only because it’s totally imprecise and euphemistic, but because it makes race the problem, and not racism. For a field always concerned about bias, that’s a large amount of injected bias there!

6. More jokes

7. Facts

Referred to electing his black opponent @AndrewGillum as “monkeying up” FloridaFeatured at virulently anti-Muslim gatherings with the likes of Bannon/MiloAdmin of an FB group that shared racist memes“Racists think he’s a racist”

Continue reading ‘Racial Stumbles’: New York Times Gets Dragged For Refusing To Call Ron DeSantis Racist

'Racial Stumbles': New York Times Gets Dragged For Refusing To Call Ron DeSantis Racist

[caption id="attachment_3835048" align="alignnone" width="918"] Source: Mark Wallheiser / Getty[/caption]
The Florida gubernatorial race has increasingly made national headlines in the weeks ahead of Tuesday's midterm elections, but on Friday it was the New York Times' own headline that should have been making the news.
The contest between Democrat Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee who could become the Sunshine State's first African-American governor, and Republican Ron DeSantis, a former congressman, took a decidedly racist turn immediately following the primary in August. Reacting to the Democrat's victory, DeSantis implored his supporters not to "monkey this up" by electing Gillum. That comment preceded a handful of other racist comments as well as racist ads and even robocalls funded by white supremacists. In fact, DeSantis has a long history of being racist.
Yet and still, despite all of the above and more that hasn't been mentioned here, the Times ran a political analysis piece about DeSantis that was topped with the following headline: "Trump Favorite in Florida Struggles To Rise After Racial Stumbles."
Those last two words, in particular, caught folks' eyes -- especially HuffPost reporter Marina Fang, who tweeted a screenshot of the story accompanied by a "thinking face" emoji, a brilliantly appropriate digital image typically reserved for things that make you go hmmmmmm.
https://twitter.com/marinafang/status/1058703831113089025
Given DeSantis' rhetoric during this campaign (and well before it), it struck folks as curious (to put it mildly) why the Times, a bastion of free speech, would shy away from calling a candidate who accepted money from a man who once called Barack Obama a "Muslim nigger" a racist. The ready support the president, who has ramped up his own racist rhetoric as of late, only strengthens the argument that DeSantis is racist.
It was unclear what the Times' style guide dictates for identifying racism and racists. Who knows? Maybe it was just a classic case of a major news organization having a glaring lack of diversity when it comes to key decision makers. But one thing was for sure: Without a public editor in place and a drastic reduction of copy editors, social media may be the only way to keep the Times (and mainstream media) in check.
This story proves that notion, as thousands of social media users chimed in with their own collective "thinking face emoji" tweets wondering how the Times missed the mark on calling DeSantis the racist that he has repeatedly proven himself to be.